“Why are you stopping?” Stacy whispers nervously.
“We won’t get far in this thing,” Nicky states. “We’ll go to my brother’s. It’s right around the corner.” He gets out and offers his hand, scanning the empty sidewalk, as one stiletto boot follows another onto the concrete.
When she takes his arm, crossing the street, a shiver of recognition shoots up his spine, his chivalry tainted.
She looks back, puzzled. “What about your car?”
He forgot that the car is his. “I’ll call it in as stolen.”
She seems to consider this. “Okay,” she says softly.
He nods and remembers what a real thief would remember. “Wait here.”
The passenger side is wounded with depressed streaks of ugliness and, at the shoulder, an awful black spot—an absolute absence of something that once existed, severed at the root—marking the trajectory of that brief ride. Inside, the light dissolves around him. He glances at the beautiful woman waiting by the trunk of a tree, cupped hands at her elbows. She could run, as he’d urged her, but she is waiting for him—and this is something good, he tells himself. There may be hope. He stuffs the bag of dope into the puffy pocket at his knee, a perfect fit, slips the gun into the slim pocket at his hip, along with the keys—he adds the Zippo and alights.
When he reaches her, a distant siren pops and goes silent. She squeezes his arm and pulls herself close. “Did you call?” she asks.
“That car is officially stolen,” he assures her.
Two more blocks, and they ascend the stoop and stairs to his apartment. Inside, she heads straight for the living room. When he comes from the kitchen with a damp washcloth, she’s facing the window, legs tightly sealed, poised steadily on those two impossibly tall, thin pedestals he hadn’t noticed give her at least an inch on him. She appears unsure at first, until he gestures toward her forehead. Her whole body sinks, softens, under the warm pressure, and just like that the thin line of dried blood has vanished.
“It’s gone,” he says, and for a moment pretends he has erased their troubles. He can see a million miles in her eyes, infinite stretches of sun-baked highways and yellow-ribboned roads that go on forever. She must feel discovered. Her eyes close and lips descend. When her tongue meets his, he finds the bare small of her back and pulls her against him. He travels to her neck, her shoulder, the hidden downy hair behind her ear. There is a line, he imagines, joining his two hands, and that line is the golden zipper he delicately fingers. As they shift toward the couch, he thinks, I can die now, just as she whispers, “Stop.”
“What is it?”
They sit, fingers entwined on their adjoining thighs.
“What about your brother?” she says.
He shakes his head. “God knows where he sleeps every night.” He frees a hand and touches her cheek, her forehead.
“I can’t,” she says, and turns away. “Not like this. Not tonight. I should go.”
“You can’t go out there.”
“I don’t live far.” She’s already up. “Please don’t get the wrong idea—I am so grateful. You saved my life tonight.”
“I’ll walk you.” He follows her to the door, where she pauses.
“Please …” She touches his face, takes his hand. “Thank you.”
“You want to get high?”
“No,” she laughs. She must think he’s joking—one last crack for the road. “I’ll call you,” she grins, dabs bashfully at her forehead, “1-800-INJURED, right?” and slips from his fingers.
Her smile lingers in the room, the memory of it tangible, like molecules of goodness dissipating in the air, as dingy reality returns and he sinks into the couch. 1-800-INJURED. He contemplates the implications of a single phone call. God knows how Chris will work his magic once the sordid tale unfolds.
Nicky hits the lights, lies back on the couch, unloads the weighty goods from his pockets. He rolls a fat one, sparks the Zippo.
In a dream, it’s Nicky’s office. She’s in her anchorwoman skirt suit; he’s in Armani. They are just back from lunch, from a real restaurant, one with no theme. He closes the door. She pulls him by the tie toward the big desk. This is their routine.
A knocking wakes him. The light from his phone glows. Sirens ring out. Windows and walls flash. He sits up, stares at the door.
Phone in one hand, gun in the other.
“Open the door, Nicky!”
“They’re coming for me,” he mumbles.
“Everything’s gonna be fine.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Don’t be stupid, fuckhead. Listen to me. It’s your brother, who loves you.”
In his mind he can see him out there, pounding, head against the door, and then it’s as if he’s out there himself, feeling what it might be like to be left alone. “I love you too,” he blurts, and when he leaps for the door, to let his brother in, it’s as though he’s racing to save them both.
“CANNOT EASY NORMAL DIE”
BY CARLIN ROMANO
University City
If every block in Philadelphia had only one resident, Isaac figured, lots of things would be different. Parking would be easier. Mail carriers would stop screwing up. Next-door neighbors too dumb to pack their garbage in plastic bags might disappear, because you wouldn’t have a next-door neighbor.
Isaac saw the downside too. Infrequent block parties. A pathetic neighborhood association. Ratcheting up of that lonely feeling Isaac used to get when he lived in Vermont and wondered how people in isolated houses survived the big snowstorms.
One-person blocks might even stir up aristocratic leanings, a sense of “to the manor born” that might lead people to consider getting their streets closed off, and their fiefdoms turned into separate municipalities.
Anyway, it was just empty, abstract theorizing, because so far as Isaac knew, he was the only person—at least in University City—with a block of his own. And even the neighborhood historian couldn’t tell him exactly how St. Irenaeus Square—not that it was a square—had turned out that way.
“There used to be a stable there, where your house is, in the late nineteenth century,” ventured Mildred, the old woman with semi-encyclopedic knowledge of Spruce Hill, at the last block event to which she’d limped her way. “I think that put some potential builders off.”
Another theory, ventured by Irina Butova, the realtor who’d first showed the structure to Isaac years ago, was that his unique, detached, slope-roofed oddity of a house had been built in defiance of neighborhood logic.
401 St. Irenaeus Square, after all, sat surrounded by backyards. To Isaac’s right, when he exited his house, lay the well-maintained yards of the celebrated Queen Anne homes on Spruce Street, the area’s architectural gems. To his left, beyond his own impressive yard with sixteen trees, loomed the leafy expanse formed by the backs of Pine Street’s solid row houses, the first two being the lovingly manicured creations of Derek Gombrowicz, the friendly architect who owned them.
In front of him, as he opened his door, sat the back of the mighty twin that ended the string of Queen Anne houses along Spruce Street as it headed west. Behind him, outside his bedroom window, lay the backyards of South 42nd Street, several of them regular venues for frat parties, on which Isaac sometimes eavesdropped during slow nights.
“Is quiet and full of peace like cemetery,” Irina had joked when she’d shown it to him three years before, right after it had been cleared of its student tenants. They’d messed up the house so badly, Irina explained, that it remained on the market for a year before Christy Greenfield, one of Isaac’s old lovers (he’d always liked realtors), referred Isaac to Irina as a match made in heaven. Irina had been in one of Christy’s courses at Temple’s Real Estate Institute, and then been a trainee at Plumer when Christy was still there. They’d kept in touch.
Christy knew both her client and colleague well. Isaac, a former foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia, came with no wife, no kids, lots of boxes, pap
ers, and books, and a complete indifference to interior design. His ideal look was used bookstore, circa 1950. He wanted a house with a porch or veranda so he could, like literary heroes from the past, sit on it in a chair made of natural materials and look literary. He preferred weeds and overgrowth to a regularly landscaped yard, thinking (incorrectly) that onlookers would mistake its choked anarchy for a lush Italian garden. He refused to do housework or gardening of any kind, remarking once to Christy that such impulses had died with his father’s generation.
Irina, for reasons Christy didn’t understand, had ended up with the 401 St. Irenaeus listing even though she mainly worked Russian neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia. It had something to do with the owner two back being Russian before it had been sold to the University of Pennsylvania. As listing arrangements went, it struck Christy as a bit of an odd match.
Most buyers in Spruce Hill fell into two categories. First came the mid-thirtyish academic couples new to junior teaching posts at Penn, eager to get into the catchment area so their not-yet or barely bred kids could go to Penn’s appealing new community school. For them 401 looked like a major fixerupper, the expense of which might be funded by converting 401’s unusual side garden—one of the largest in University City—into the site for another house.
The second category of buyers was the older Wharton or med-school types, often full professors or moneyed professionals who’d settle for nothing less than Architectural Digest perfection and were willing to pay for contractors to accomplish it. One couple of the sort had purchased the first Queen Anne west of 42nd Street a few years back for about $700,000, torn it up inside, created a huge atrium perfect for a glossy-magazine shoot, then put it back on the market for $950,000.
Both types seemed perfect for 401 St. Irenaeus. But Irina, to Christy’s surprise, couldn’t unload it that first year. According to Irina, Christy told Isaac, something had gone wrong every time it looked as if she had a buyer—financing that fell through, cold feet, fear of crime, whatever.
Christy, of course, knew it had to be more complicated than that—it always is when selling houses. One couple that had bid on 401, before Isaac came into the picture, told Christy that Irina grew belligerent when they asked about the legality of building a second house on the side yard, which was wider than 401 itself. “You buy sixteen fantastic trees to kill sixteen fantastic trees?” Irina had said to them. “Believe me, for you I can find house without trees! Not this house!”
That’s the story that first made Christy think of Isaac, who she knew was house-hunting. True, he’d been house-hunting for more than twenty years, since he’d come to Philly from New York. And Isaac had long since admitted to Christy that while he was, in principle, looking for a house, house-hunting was also one of his tried and true methods for picking up new lovers. Isaac knew how to charm real-estate agents, even the crusty cynics, and, Christy had to admit, his stratagem had worked with her.
From Isaac’s point of view, visiting open houses always beat Internet dating or bar-hopping (though it came a distant second to chatting up women at academic conferences). First, all real-estate agents had their photos and first and last names right there in the Sunday ads. You could research them, narrow the field to the most appealing, then go to their open houses and see how they stacked up in the harsh setting of real life. You couldn’t do that with the Internet unless you had a spare decade to spend on coffee dates.
Nothing beat an open house for inviting friendly conversation, self-revelatory or inquisitive, free of all activity clumsily designed to bring boys and girls together. When Isaac felt he’d clicked with an agent, he followed up by making some excuse about the house itself, while dangling an overture about a meal or coffee sometime. And so something would or wouldn’t begin. And every affair that did begin, he explained to Christy, far outweighed—on the scale of pure pleasure—any number that didn’t.
Had Christy known Isaac’s MO the day he came to see a trinity she was handling on Waverly Street years ago, their seven-month thing would never have happened. She’d thought he liked the house, not her headshot in the Sunday Inquirer real-estate section. But he let on only years later, long after they’d climbed back from the breakup to be solid if irregular pals, able to talk about his or her latest romantic disasters.
Because Isaac couldn’t commit to anything beyond his next piece or foreign trip, Christy knew he’d never commit to building on 401’s side yard. He fit Irina’s oddly proprietary criteria for 401. Irina wanted someone who wouldn’t endanger the overgrown yard. She quickly discouraged would-be buyers who eyed the property as a twofer—one unique detached house, one enormous lot where you could build a second structure and make a killing.
“Is like Russian forest,” Irina had joked to Isaac the first time she showed him how 401’s side yard, and Gombrowicz’s backyard, combined to form a veritable mini-park of soaring evergreens and overlapping foliage. The only difference was that Gombrowicz’s yard had neatly cut grass on its ground. The vines and weeds to the side of 401 made it look like a house that had landed, Wizard of Oz style, on a jungle floor, with terra firma at least six inches below the sight line.
Christy knew her biz. The sale and closing happened fast. Christy even suspected that Isaac and Irina might have slept together preclosing, despite Irina’s being a few years older than Isaac, which put her about twenty years outside his routine demographic. The only time the three of them had drinks together, she’d seen the flirtation between them, Isaac dropping more than necessary of the fifty words that had gotten him around Russia, and Irina looking overamused at his anecdotes about St. Petersburg.
In the two years since the closing, Christy had seen Isaac about six or seven times for one of their friendly meals or coffees. The conversations took their usual pre-401 course. First they’d gossip about the Inquirer (where Isaac now found himself bored as the paper spiraled downward to irrelevance), City Hall sorts they both knew, what was in the news.
At some point, Isaac would send a signal that he’d still happily sleep with Christy and Christy would gracefully rebuff him. Then they’d share recent romantic wins and losses. The new part, which Christy disliked but also found professionally flattering, were Isaac’s questions about his rights and possibilities as the sole owner and resident on the 400 block of St. Irenaeus.
At dinner the previous Friday, Isaac, oddly, seemed ready for a commitment.
“Seriously,” he’d said, “I know Irina would kill me, but would it really be so hard to get the permission and variances to build a small house in the yard, one that would still leave some greenery and trees?”
“I told you already, Isaac,” Christy replied, “it’s not a big deal. You own that lot. There are no covenants or restrictions on it. Your neighbors and Irina might go apeshit, but it’s a pretty clear path.”
“I’m more afraid of Irina than Derek,” Isaac said. “I’m beginning to think real-estate women have a harder time pulling away from houses they sell than from men they, so to speak, handle—”
“Nice try,” Christy cut it. “But I hear a new form of whining just around the corner. Let’s not go there.”
“The last time she dropped by,” Isaac said, taking Christy’s cue and dropping the “Poor me” tone, “I was watching Larry King do his latest Michael Jackson show, about the endless wait for the funeral. At first Irina was funny. She listened to it for about a minute, then uttered one of those Irina-isms I love.” Isaac shifted into his heavily Russian Irina impersonation and accent. Poor Michael Jackson! Cannot easy normal die!
“So I was feeling obnoxious,” Isaac continued, dropping the accent, “and said, ‘Right, Irina, you can only easy normal die in Russia. You just sit in your car after offending someone powerful, or write the wrong story, and pow—you’re gone.’”
“That was nasty!” Christy said. “You know she loves that whole Russian tough-guy thing, and Putin. Plus she really doesn’t like anyone even noticing her accent, let alone making fun of it.”
“I know, I know,” Isaac said, a little too knowingly for Christy’s taste, “and, yeah, she did act strange, weird, after that. She just looked at me in a way she never has before. Really cold, as if she didn’t recognize me.”
“Have you slept with her?” Christy asked with a chirp in her voice.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Isaac shot back. “I’ve told you before—no.”
“Yes, but you’ve also told me ‘No’ about other women in real estate, then changed it to ‘Yes.’”
“What’s the point?” Isaac asked.
“The point is,” Christy said, her sarcasm getting the best of her, “if she wants to share that unique feeling of being with you, and you haven’t gotten there yet, don’t jerk her chain.”
“I guess I can’t say I’ve never slept with my realtor,” Isaac offered, hoping for a smile.
“No, you can’t,” Christy replied, not granting one.
A week later, Isaac made clear to Christy that he wasn’t kidding about the side yard. His 401K had dropped 40 percent in the recession. His bridge loan on 401 would come due in two more years. Isaac wanted to know if, at least, the second-house idea was feasible.
In the eleven years since they’d stopped sleeping together, Christy had never made a dime off Isaac. Now, she thought, she should.
“Look, Isaac, if you’re really serious about this,” she told him on the phone, “let’s deal. The first thing you have to do is to see if it’s even possible to lay a foundation and build there. If you’re serious, for a $5,000 retainer, with you bearing the costs, I’ll arrange for the initial testing.”
“Five thousand is pretty steep,” said Isaac. “How much would the testing cost?”
“Probably a couple of thousand.”
“Five thousand is too high,” Isaac said. “What would you think of doing it as a team, with you taking a commission if I build the little house? You said all along that this was a unique property and situation—sort of ‘Own your own block right smack in University City.’ You could sell both together for over a million. I’d give you 10 percent on the whole thing.”
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